Summoner School

Transcript

G'day I'm UberGiantsBro and today I'm going to show you how to deal with ranked anxiety in League of Legends. I used to have ranked anxiety back in season 1 about when the season 1 rewards were announced because this made take ranked more seriously. Now this anxiety made me a toxic player, believe it or not.

I stopped enjoying playing the game because it just made me angry and I only started enjoying League again when I was able to deal with my anxiety through some advice my older brother gave me that I'll show you in this video. After that I'll tell you 3 of THE most important things you should always remember when approaching ranked games so keep watching.

Now before I fixed my anxiety there was a big hurdle that I had to overcome. I'm not a psychologist and I'm not going to explain to you how the brain works or anything like that but one of the things I had to realise was that it was okay for me to be angry. What wasn't okay was how I expressed it. The main challenge for me in dealing with my anxiety was not to stop myself getting angry but to focus more on other emotions, the ones that help me play better and let me improve.

So I would still get angry but instead of raging at others I would focus harder on my game, concentrate on what I could do better next time and use that anger as motivation to improve myself.

Now this small change in my mindset had a massive impact on how I played and thought about the game. I started enjoying the game more. And because I was enjoying the game more, I was more motivated to improve as a player and learn from my mistakes and I went from about 1600 elo (which was gold) in season 1 to around 2200 elo in season 2 on the NA server with 200 ping.

It was like the dam of improvement was unblocked and all the elo came rushing out. I'm not boasting about my elo but just giving you an example of how a small change in your mentality can make the biggest difference in your overall skill and improvement as a player.

So obviously not everyone will have the same anxiety or the same goal in League of Legends but if you're hitting a wall in your improvement, or you're "stuck in elo hell" or WHATEVER, it might be because you're focusing on the wrong thing. You could be getting bogged down in your anger like I was or you could frustrated at the afkers and this stops from you improving (because you're no longer concentrating on improving!), or you could be scared of even playing ranked because of the ragers you've heard about. These are just some examples of ranked anxiety you might be dealing with.

Whatever the cause for your ranked anxiety is, there's a couple things you should remember;

1. League of Legends is just a game.

As cliche as that sounds and as funny as those jokes like chicks dig elo are at the end of the day that's all League of Legends is. It's a game. And unless you're a professional at League of Legends or trying to get into the pro scene and you need the higher rank to get scouted or whatever then your ranking is only for you. If you have pressure or issues in real life that are giving you anxiety, please deal with them directly.

2. You have time to increase your rank.

Now unless you're racing for a higher tier to get an end of season reward or you're studying League of Legends and your homework is to get silver by next week, remember that you have TIME to increase your rank. In the overall context of you playing League of Legends, it doesn't really matter if you lost that long ranked game or even that placement series (FOR WHATEVER REASON), what does matter is that you LEARN from it so that you're more likely to win next time. Focus on one simple thing you can get better at and your rank will soon follow.

3. If you're *THAT* good, you will get to where you belong eventually.

Unfortunately this might make you realise that you're not as good as you believe you are. But that's okay, because like I said before, all it takes is a shift in mentality to focusing on your mistakes and improving instead of getting angry about afkers or how bad your team is. I once made a new account along with my brother who's also challenger. We leveled it up from scratch and only played with eachother for fun and jumped straight into ranked when we had the minimum characters. We got to challenger in X games, and people around us were amazed to see us rank up that fast. But the thing is, we weren't, we knew that it was only a matter of time like I said in point 2.

We had about 5 4v5's on the way up to challenger and we even won a couple of them, but we weren't angry at the others because we knew that in the context of things a loss here or there didn't really matter because we would get to challenger anyway. I mained Heimerdinger and he mained Warwick for the most part.

Now, continuing on from point 2 and 3 where I say it's only a matter of time, you might be saying "well it's going to take forever because I struggle to see my own mistakes and I don't have that much time in the first place". Great. That's why myself and my two brothers have put hours and hours into creating the most complete League of Legends guide out there so that you can save yourself time.

If you're gold and below and value your time and would like to speed up your improvement then check out Summoner School at thelolguide.com If you're above gold you can still learn from it but there are basic concepts covered in the guide which you might want to skip over.

That's all for this video on how to deal with Ranked anxiety in LoL, please thumb it up if you learned from it or enjoyed it and until next time all the best in solo queue.

Transcript

1. You suffer from the 'Dunning-Kruger' effect.

Taken from the font of all knowledge, Wikipedia:

In laymans terms - you're bad at LoL but you think you're the best. I would estimate about 90% of LoL players suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect. This is why I've (and I'm sure you have) had friends who refuse to play LoL simply because of the amount of 'big headedness' in the game.

If you're reading this, that's a good sign. Learn to accept that you're not the perfect League of Legends player. Even a lot of high level players are held back from improving because of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

2. You don't mesh with your team.

You might not think meshing with your team is important, but the fact of the matter is that you need your team to be fighting to win the game, not fighting each other. Sun Tzu in his book The Art of War said,

One of the ways you can mesh with your team is by establishing some quick rapport. This generally takes less than 20 seconds to do and can set you up for an enjoyable ranked game.

Some of the ways you can establish quick rapport include talking about recent LoL changes, joke about someone's user name (laugh with them), complementing someone on  a champion pick and so on.

By the way, what you just read was an excerpt from Summoner School. This is what really sets Summoner School apart from anything else I've ever seen about LoL and what gets me so excited to be a part of it. It teaches you more than just mechanics, it teaches you life skills and how to interact with people in League of Legends so that you can win more ranked games and have fun doing it.

3. You're not a flexible player.

Think about this for a sec, what sort of teammate would you rather get queued up with? Someone who must have a specific role and is threatening to feed if they don't or someone who is willing to compromise and work with the team. Despite common 'Silver League theory', League of Legends is a team game. It takes teamwork to win.

Don't expect your team to be flexy for you, be the flexible person and work with your team.

Learn to play more than 1 role. You don't have to play all roles and you can still have your 'preferred' role. Just have a couple roles that you are comfortable with and you'll have a much better time in Yolo Queue.

4. You don't ward enough.

If you're stuck in silver league, chances are you don't ward enough. There's really not a lot to it - wards are your best friend in LoL. Buy more of them. If you're jungling, you could even consder buying a sightstone to help your team out.

If you want some good examples for WHERE to ward, check out Gbay's video on 'Everything You Need To Know About Warding'.

5. You don't understand how to push your advantage.

League of Legends is snowbally game. However, since the  season 3 changes to the way killing spree and experience bonuses work from killing a champion, there is now more of an opportunity to come back in any game of LoL than there ever used to be. This is even truer in the lower leagues where players have a habit of throwing their advantages away.

If you understand how to push the advantages that you gain and not throw them away 'willy nilly' like most Silver players do, you can drive home any game that you get ahead in and punish your opponents for making silly mistakes.

This is something that a lot of top level players do WAY better than the average low ranked player, they push their advantages. A massive part of this is knowing when to take your advantage and group to end the laning phase and when to stay split.

Unfortunately I don't have enough time to cover that whole topic right here, if you'd like to find out more hints and tips to help you raise your league right now, check out Summoner School at thelolguide.com.

So that's all for 'Why You're Stuck In Silver League'. I'm UberGiantsBro, you can follow me on Twitter @UberGiantsBro. Have a great day!